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You know, I don’t share your antipathy toward the Islamic conquests of Europe in the least, but your response indicates to me that the angle taken by the author

You know, I don’t share your antipathy toward the Islamic conquests of Europe in the least, but your response indicates to me that the angle taken by the author (which reeks of the kind of cultural self-flagellation that is en vogue these days) could do less to “challenge Islamophobia” as the press release says, than it can to embolden it or at least disturb people who would have otherwise benefited from the history without being force-fed a narrative that could be expressed differently (I’m not accusing you of Islamophobia, by the way). My knee-jerk impression is that this book is using Islamic history as a pawn in today’s “culture wars”. It will enlighten few, and serve as material for the in-group who is most likely to purchase it to pontificate over at cocktail parties.

pipes 3y ago
Can someone explain why the parent post has been flagged?
- pvg 3y ago
  Yes, it's mentioned in the site guidelines: Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead. The comment picks a word out, then claims the book is 'framed as' that (it's not) and then pirouettes to exactly the sort of culture flamewar rehearsed talking point it wrongly accuses the book of engaging in, complete with the URL barrage such comments often include. Absolutely none of it has anything to do with Islamic architecture's influence in Europe - the topic of the book. As a first comment, it successfully kills any chance we'd get an interesting thread. The people who flagged it were right and the people who vouched for it were mistaken.
  - the_lego 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - selimthegrim 3y ago
      Do you think predominantly Muslim ethnicities such as Bosnians or Albanians or Lipka/Crimean Tatars have a place in Europe then?
      - the_lego 3y ago
        What does that have to do with allowing casual lies about history to go unchallenged? Let's say they do have a place - does that mean we have to whitewash the history of Muslim conquest? In other cases of descendants of invasions, they're made to call themselves 'settlers' and give land acknowledgments. The least we can do here is not tell lies.
        tptacek 3y ago
        None of this has anything to do with the book.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - pvg 3y ago
      Again, none of this has anything to do with what the book is about. You picked a word or two and went on a tangent completely unrelated to the topic at hand. However, coming from a country that was directly in the path of Ottoman invasions Well, I come from a country that was part of the Ottoman empire for half a millennium. I don't feel it gives me license to poop in every forum I participate in. Should I have allowed the lie to proliferate, for the sake of the interesting discussion that might come about? You can't make up umbrage to derail discussions into your personal hobbyhorse discussions, at least not here or the place gets worse. It's one of the basic conventions of the site.
  - pipes 3y ago
    Given that the title of the book is provocative, I really don't see this the issue here.
    - pvg 3y ago
      The title of the book is not provocative and even if it was, the guideline is there precisely because it is an issue for a messageboard with HN's aspirations. If you think escalation of yelliness is good thing for a forum, that's fine but HN is not such a forum and explicitly doesn't work like that.
      - pipes 3y ago
        But no one was yelling.
        pvg 3y ago
        Nobody literally yells in on a text forum, no.
the_lego 3y ago
> your antipathy toward the Islamic conquests of Europe While I'm certainly not a fan of them, I'm not particularly outraged about them either. Wars of naked conquest were simply the way back then, and the Islamic world was not exceptionally brutal compared to others, including Europe. My antipathy is towards those that seek to erase or twist this history. I realize the main point is architectural influences, but that only makes the lie more insidious - a casual statement most won't pay much attention to, and simply assume it accurate, like the presence of kilts in Braveheart.
- the-printer 3y ago
  We can count beans over whether it's appropriate to address how Islam entered the region in a PR piece, but I think we'd just be waxing historian in traditional HN fashion. After some thought, it's obvious that it's beyond the scope of this book to address the history of the Islamic conquest to the extent that you desire (I failed in my part to recognize this earlier). I can understand how it can be interpreted that the book is advertised in a way that compels some of its Western readership to assume an implicit guilt or adversarial role as "Islamophobes" who denigrate the influence that the Islamic world had on its land. I myself was skeptic of this tone at first, but as a whole it simply isn't the responsibility of this particular book to cater to readers who want the history of the Islamic conquests from the perspective of the West (as the colonized) to be brought forth aside from the architectural influences that the conquests had. War and colonization involve more than just the bloodshed of the belligerents. For us to even focus on the just the event of conquest at the expense of what occurred afterward does a historical and cultural injustice. The Islamic conquests are in fact unique in this regard, as opposed to say, the Belgian Congo. The irony here is that I can make the same accusation of "self-flagellation" to those who are desperate to be recognized as "the colonized" (in this instance by a cultural "other", in a sense) as I can make against people who woefully lament their history as "the colonizers". The former accusation feels even more apt because if so much lengths have to be taken to recall this history, maybe that's indicative of the significant steps that the region (as a collective) has made in progressing past that stage of their legacy. Of course I feel that there are some exemptions. But on the whole, as I've said elsewhere, the Western world (as a hegemonic region that claims the most prosperous nations materially) in a way has lost the "narrative privilege" of the periods where they didn't have the upper hand being popularly discussed.Of course there are exceptions to this, but the Islamic conquests primarily have the distinction of being carried out by nations who if not foreigners themselves were driven by motives—the Islamic faith—entirely foreign to the invaded lands. It's not that there's anything to erase or twist, my hunch is that aside from specific historical discussions like this one, it's not worth mentioning.

pipes 3y ago

Can someone explain why the parent post has been flagged?

pvg 3y ago
Yes, it's mentioned in the site guidelines: Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead. The comment picks a word out, then claims the book is 'framed as' that (it's not) and then pirouettes to exactly the sort of culture flamewar rehearsed talking point it wrongly accuses the book of engaging in, complete with the URL barrage such comments often include. Absolutely none of it has anything to do with Islamic architecture's influence in Europe - the topic of the book. As a first comment, it successfully kills any chance we'd get an interesting thread. The people who flagged it were right and the people who vouched for it were mistaken.
- the_lego 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - selimthegrim 3y ago
    Do you think predominantly Muslim ethnicities such as Bosnians or Albanians or Lipka/Crimean Tatars have a place in Europe then?
    - the_lego 3y ago
      What does that have to do with allowing casual lies about history to go unchallenged? Let's say they do have a place - does that mean we have to whitewash the history of Muslim conquest? In other cases of descendants of invasions, they're made to call themselves 'settlers' and give land acknowledgments. The least we can do here is not tell lies.
      - tptacek 3y ago
        None of this has anything to do with the book.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - pvg 3y ago
    Again, none of this has anything to do with what the book is about. You picked a word or two and went on a tangent completely unrelated to the topic at hand. However, coming from a country that was directly in the path of Ottoman invasions Well, I come from a country that was part of the Ottoman empire for half a millennium. I don't feel it gives me license to poop in every forum I participate in. Should I have allowed the lie to proliferate, for the sake of the interesting discussion that might come about? You can't make up umbrage to derail discussions into your personal hobbyhorse discussions, at least not here or the place gets worse. It's one of the basic conventions of the site.
- pipes 3y ago
  Given that the title of the book is provocative, I really don't see this the issue here.
  - pvg 3y ago
    The title of the book is not provocative and even if it was, the guideline is there precisely because it is an issue for a messageboard with HN's aspirations. If you think escalation of yelliness is good thing for a forum, that's fine but HN is not such a forum and explicitly doesn't work like that.
    - pipes 3y ago
      But no one was yelling.
      - pvg 3y ago
        Nobody literally yells in on a text forum, no.

the_lego 3y ago

> your antipathy toward the Islamic conquests of Europe While I'm certainly not a fan of them, I'm not particularly outraged about them either. Wars of naked conquest were simply the way back then, and the Islamic world was not exceptionally brutal compared to others, including Europe. My antipathy is towards those that seek to erase or twist this history. I realize the main point is architectural influences, but that only makes the lie more insidious - a casual statement most won't pay much attention to, and simply assume it accurate, like the presence of kilts in Braveheart.

the-printer 3y ago
We can count beans over whether it's appropriate to address how Islam entered the region in a PR piece, but I think we'd just be waxing historian in traditional HN fashion. After some thought, it's obvious that it's beyond the scope of this book to address the history of the Islamic conquest to the extent that you desire (I failed in my part to recognize this earlier). I can understand how it can be interpreted that the book is advertised in a way that compels some of its Western readership to assume an implicit guilt or adversarial role as "Islamophobes" who denigrate the influence that the Islamic world had on its land. I myself was skeptic of this tone at first, but as a whole it simply isn't the responsibility of this particular book to cater to readers who want the history of the Islamic conquests from the perspective of the West (as the colonized) to be brought forth aside from the architectural influences that the conquests had. War and colonization involve more than just the bloodshed of the belligerents. For us to even focus on the just the event of conquest at the expense of what occurred afterward does a historical and cultural injustice. The Islamic conquests are in fact unique in this regard, as opposed to say, the Belgian Congo. The irony here is that I can make the same accusation of "self-flagellation" to those who are desperate to be recognized as "the colonized" (in this instance by a cultural "other", in a sense) as I can make against people who woefully lament their history as "the colonizers". The former accusation feels even more apt because if so much lengths have to be taken to recall this history, maybe that's indicative of the significant steps that the region (as a collective) has made in progressing past that stage of their legacy. Of course I feel that there are some exemptions. But on the whole, as I've said elsewhere, the Western world (as a hegemonic region that claims the most prosperous nations materially) in a way has lost the "narrative privilege" of the periods where they didn't have the upper hand being popularly discussed.Of course there are exceptions to this, but the Islamic conquests primarily have the distinction of being carried out by nations who if not foreigners themselves were driven by motives—the Islamic faith—entirely foreign to the invaded lands. It's not that there's anything to erase or twist, my hunch is that aside from specific historical discussions like this one, it's not worth mentioning.